4,000-year-old goddess unveiled

A ravishing 4,000-year-old goddess went on display yesterday at the British Museum, acquired for £1.5m 70 years after the institution first tried to buy her.

Nicknamed The Queen of the Night, she is crowned and bejewelled. She is made from clay mixed with straw, and was originally brilliantly painted.

Although the image has never been on public display, a photograph was published in the 1920s, when an American academic suggested she could have been a brothel sign from ancient Baghdad.

Yesterday, curator Irving Finkel said the brothel idea was a red herring, since the work was costly and of the highest craftsmanship. It was "not the thing you'd find in the kind of place where lorry drivers go for a quickie".

The British Museum director, Neil MacGregor, described it as "astounding", and said it was by far the most important acquisition made by the museum for its 250th anniversary.

The museum tried to acquire the piece in 1933 and again in the 1970s. It finally bought it from a Japanese dealer with heritage lottery funds and grants from the Art Fund, the museum's friends and other charities.

The image will begin a tour next weekend, with other objects from the museum's Mesopotamian collection, going to Glasgow then Sunderland, Leicester, the Horniman Museum in London, Cardiff and Birmingham. The museum then hopes to send it back on loan to Baghdad.